Vortex magnétiques couplés dans des oscillateurs à transfert de spin : de l'excitation résonante à la synchronisation mutuelle

The discovery of the giant magnetoresistance in 1988 is considered as the birth date of a new and dynamic research field called spintronics. The rich physics associated with spin transport has created a breakthrough for the future of nano-electronics. In the magnetism roadmap, spin-torque oscillators (STOs) are candidates for future generation of spintronic based rf-devices.At the beginning of this thesis, one major issue of spin-torque oscillators remained their poor spectral coherence. To overcome this issue, we have investigated different approaches: (i) the development of magnetic materials with a low damping and large spin-polarization, (ii) the study of collective mode dynamics in hybridized magnetic systems (iii) the stabilization of the STO dynamics with a reference external signal (iv) the synchronization of multiple STOs to enhance both their power and spectral coherence. We focus our work on vortex based STOs which present higher spectral coherences than other kinds of STOs.In a first part, we study the different mechanisms that can drive and stabilize the dynamics of a vortex based STO in the autonomous and non-autonomous regimes. We first highlight that the excitation of collective modes allows the harnessing the rf-properties of a single and isolated in a double vortex based STO. Then we report the ``perfect'' phase-locking of a STO with an external rf-current. To go beyond this analysis, we notice that a 1 Hz minimum linewidth and a flat phase noise level of -90 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz from the offset frequency in the locked state could be associated with the absence of phase slips, i.e desynchronization events. We demonstrate that the locking process is driven by a Field-like in-plane torque which gives the possibility to control with precision the STO locking process. In our double vortex based STO, we can even observe exotic behaviors such as multi-mode synchronization, self-resonance and eventually incoherent motion. Such a degree of control, unexpected for a nano-scale oscillator, is particularly promising for the development of STO based nanodevices.In a second part, we propose different concepts of spintronic rf-devices based on vortex STOs. We describe the basis of an on-chip STO based phase locked loop. By taking advantage of the large Field-like torque in our STOs, we develop a new radio-frequency detection scheme, more efficient than the state of the art Schottky diode, based on magnetization switching through the resonant and reversible expulsion of the vortex core. Finally, we show the first experimental observation of the electrical synchronization of two STOs connected directly in parallel or in series, or with an electrical delay line. In the synchronized state, we show a strong improvement of both the spectral coherence (by a factor 2) and the output power (by a factor 4, up to 1.6 μW). We also demonstrate, with an electrical delay line, the strong impact of the phase shift between the two STOs on the synchronized regime. These promising results open the way for the synchronization of STO arrays at zero field and without electrical delays.Ten years after their discovery, spin-torque oscillators have thus not yet revealed all their potential and promising applications could be soon targeted, in order to realize a spin logic circuit, bio-inspired spintronic devices and more classical rf-applications.